The Democratic National Committee released its long-delayed post-mortem on Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential election loss on Thursday, more than a year after the November defeat. The 192-page document — produced by Democratic consultant Paul Rivera under the tentative title “Build to Win. Build to Last” — arrived with an extraordinary accompanying apology from DNC Chair Ken Martin, who acknowledged that the report “does not meet my standards” and that he does not “endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it.” NPR reported that the document contains placeholder text, missing sections including an executive summary and conclusion, factual errors including a claim that Democrats won two gubernatorial races in 2024 when they actually won three, and annotations throughout noting that specific claims “contradict public reporting” or are “not supported by publicly available data.” No source material was provided to the DNC, making independent verification impossible. Martin released it “unedited and unabridged” only after sustained activist pressure.
The received wisdom
The sympathetic reading of the Democrats’ plight is that this report, for all its flaws, names real things. Harris entered the race late, against a candidate whose negatives were unusually well-baked-in among voters who were tired of them, and was handed — as the report puts it — a “politically toxic” portfolio on immigration without the institutional preparation to manage it. The Biden White House, the report suggests, prioritised its own institutional legacy over ensuring that its vice president was positioned to succeed. The transgender ad — which Republican strategists consider among the most effective of the cycle, and which Harris refused to respond to by changing her position — was a genuine liability. All of this is true, and none of it is comfortable for the party to acknowledge. The fact that the document was withheld for months and is now acknowledged as flawed does not necessarily mean its underlying findings are wrong. A party that has faced significant losses since 2016, with only the aberrational 2020 and 2022 cycles offering relief, has genuine structural challenges to reckon with, and reckoning with them is more honest than not.
A different read
The problem with this generous reading is that the document’s most significant feature is not what it says about 2024 but what it omits — and the omissions are not random. Al Jazeera’s analysis notes that in 192 pages examining an election in which the Biden-Harris administration supplied approximately $18 billion to Israel and vetoed multiple UN ceasefire resolutions, the words “Gaza” and “Israel” do not appear. Harris’s own deputy campaign manager, Rob Flaherty, had described Gaza as “a giant, rotting fish around our necks” throughout the campaign. A 2025 IMEU Policy Project survey found the issue was a top concern among 2020 Biden voters who did not support Harris in 2024. An autopsy that cannot name the patient’s most visible wound is not an autopsy. It is a cosmetology report.
This is not primarily a point about Gaza policy, which is contested and on which reasonable people disagree. It is a point about institutional honesty. A party that cannot produce an accurate, complete, sourced account of its own recent failures — in a document specifically commissioned for that purpose — is signalling something important about its capacity for the kind of clear-eyed reckoning that electoral turnarounds historically require. The Republicans produced their own “Growth and Opportunity Project” after the 2012 loss. It was unusually candid — perhaps too candid, since the party eventually won by ignoring most of its recommendations. But it was at least a real document with named authors, verifiable sources, and coherent arguments. The DNC’s offering cannot match that baseline.
There is a deeper structural problem visible beneath the specific failures. Martin’s explanation for why he sat on the report for months is that releasing a flawed document would have created “a distraction.” This is a managerial instinct — protect the institution from controversy by controlling information — applied to exactly the situation where the opposite instinct is required. Parties that lose do not recover by managing information about why they lost. They recover by building new coalitions, revising their message, and accepting that the old approaches produced the old results. The American party system is unusual in its relative stability, but no major party has won five of seven presidential elections, as Republicans now have since 1988 by popular vote, without the opposing party eventually undergoing genuine intellectual renewal. The question is whether the current Democratic establishment has the capacity for that renewal or whether it will continue producing documents that apologise for their own inadequacy on the day of release.
From a right-of-centre perspective, the correct response to this spectacle is not triumphalism. A functioning opposition party is a public good; it disciplines governing parties, forces arguments to be made rather than simply asserted, and provides an exit option for voters dissatisfied with incumbents. A Democratic Party that is institutionally sclerotic — capable of running elections in Virginia and New Jersey competently, but incapable of producing an honest national post-mortem — is an opposition party that will eventually lose even safe ground. The party’s unusual string of overperformances since Trump returned to office suggests genuine grassroots energy. What appears to be lacking is institutional infrastructure capable of channelling it into a coherent national argument.
What to watch
- Whether the report’s release prompts a formal challenge to Martin’s DNC chairmanship, or whether activist energy dissipates in recriminations over the document’s defects rather than producing structural change.
- How the party handles the immigration question in the 2026 midterms: the report identifies Harris’s “border czar” branding as a significant liability, and the current Democratic coalition contains competing constituencies on immigration enforcement.
- Whether the string of 2025 electoral overperformances — cited by Martin as evidence that the party is recovering — continues into 2026 midterm territory, where the national environment rather than individual candidate quality drives results.
- Any move to commission a replacement report with named authors, sourced data, and institutional endorsement — or whether Thursday’s release is effectively the end of the party’s formal self-examination of 2024.
— J